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Fusion Science and Technology
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General Kenneth Nichols and the Manhattan Project
Nichols
The Oak Ridger has published the latest in a series of articles about General Kenneth D. Nichols, the Manhattan Project, and the 1954 Atomic Energy Act. The series has been produced by Nichols’ grandniece Barbara Rogers Scollin and Oak Ridge (Tenn.) city historian David Ray Smith. Gen. Nichols (1907–2000) was the district engineer for the Manhattan Engineer District during the Manhattan Project.
As Smith and Scollin explain, Nichols “had supervision of the research and development connected with, and the design, construction, and operation of, all plants required to produce plutonium-239 and uranium-235, including the construction of the towns of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Richland, Washington. The responsibility of his position was massive as he oversaw a workforce of both military and civilian personnel of approximately 125,000; his Oak Ridge office became the center of the wartime atomic energy’s activities.”
Alain Godot, Célia Lepeytre, Jean-Charles Hubinois, Aurélien Arseguel, Jean-Pierre Daclin, Christophe Douche
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 54 | Number 1 | July 2008 | Pages 231-234
Technical Paper | Waste Handling | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1802
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This method enables an indirect, non intrusive and non destructive measurement of the Tritium activity in wastes drums. The amount of tritium enclosed inside a wastes drum can be determined by the measurement of the leak rate of 3He of this latter.The simulation predicts that a few months are necessary for establishing the equilibrium between the 3He production inside the drum and the 3He drum leak.In practice, after one year of storage, sampling 3He outside the drum can be realized by the mean of a confining chamber that collect the 3He outflow.The apparatus, the experimental procedure and the calculation of tritium activity from mass spectrometric 3He measurements are detailed. The industrial device based on a confinement cell and the automated process to measure the 3He amount at the initial time and after the confinement time is described.Firstly, reference drums containing a certified tritium activity (HTO) in addition to organic materials have been measured to qualify the method and to evaluate its performances.Secondly, tritium activity of organic wastes drums issued from the storage building in Valduc have been determined.Results of the qualification and optimised values of the experimental parameters are reported in order to determine the performances of this industrial device.As a conclusion, the apparatus enables the measurement of an activity as low as 1 GBq of tritium in a 200 liters drum containing organic wastes.